The carrier, the sixth-busiest airline at the Dayton International Airport, will leave the market on May 31, airport officials confirmed Friday.

Terrence Slaybaugh, director of aviation for the city of Dayton, which owns the airport, said Frontier representatives told him they wouldn’t compete against Southwest Airlines, which began flying from Dayton to Denver last summer.

Frontier could not be immediately reached for comment. The move comes as the airline is starting or boosting service out of cities such as Columbus, Cleveland, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and Fort Meyers, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa, Fla., as well as New Orleans.

On Jan. 3, the carrier dropped from two daily Dayton-to-Denver flights down to one flight. Through the first 11 months of 2012, Frontier had nearly 80,000 boardings in Dayton, a 6.4 percent drop from the same period in 2011.

“You never want to lose service, especially in the environment we work in right now where capacity is the rule of the day,” Slaybaugh said. “The projections are this year that the air carriers are going to reduce capacity even more to stay competitive and profitable.”

The upside, Slaybaugh said, is that the Dayton airport still has plenty of service to Denver between Southwest and United Airlines flights.

And Southwest is soon expected to begin an internal process known as “code sharing” will soon open up the Southwest markets to AirTran customers in Dayton. That stems from Southwest combining its reservation system with AirTran Airways.

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